Overview
Mandala is a companion app for a comic-book franchise of the same name, where holders of its avatar artwork stake that artwork to collect points and trade them for comics and collectibles1. The twelve animal clans are bear, butterfly, dolphin, eagle, lion, mole, raven, snake, spider, turtle, windhorse, and wolf2. Whichever avatar you set as your profile picture decides your fellowship3, and the clan you choose decides who you are ranked alongside4.
Sovereigns, the Cardano avatar collection, earn points, and when their holder delegates ADA to a stake pool, ADA staking rewards stack with those points; pools can sign up to a clan aligned with their mission1. The Cardano Foundation's developer portal describes this as backing pool operators' missions while giving their delegators a gamified experience5. Regens, the Ethereum collection, skip that step: rewards accrue from ownership alone, and the artwork never leaves the wallet1. Both sit inside a wider franchise whose Mandala graphic novel came out through Dark Horse Comics5.
Key Features
- Your collectible picks your team. The avatar you set as a profile picture assigns your fellowship automatically, and swapping to a different avatar moves you to a different fellowship3.
- Points you spend on comics. A rewards centre exchanges accumulated points for digital tokens of the Mandala and Merkaba comic series, alongside other collectibles6.
- Bonuses that stack on each other. Staking across more cycles, holding a special character, or owning one avatar from each of the twelve clans each multiply what you earn, with the full twelve-clan set worth two and a half times the base rate7.
- Three leaderboards on a five-day clock. Rankings settle each Cardano epoch, the roughly five-day cycle the network runs on: one board for individuals, one for the twelve clans, and one for the two sides of the story, Light and Shadow4.
- You can point it at your own data source. Mandala reads Cardano through Kupo, a tool that indexes the chain's records, and a settings panel lets you aim it at your own copy instead of one the project hosts5.
What to Expect
You connect a wallet first, with Eternl, Flint, or Nami on Cardano and MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet, or WalletConnect on Ethereum, then fill in a short profile and choose which avatar represents you8. The app puts you in a cell, a group of twelve players that fills before the next one opens, and in the fellowship matching your avatar's clan3.
On Cardano you can also delegate the ADA in your wallet to a stake pool. Pools can enrol in a clan, and you can belong to a different clan than the one you delegate ADA to. Pool operators join at no charge, which is where the whole idea started: the app was built for stake pool operators to promote their mission and grow their pool1.
After that it is a slow accumulation measured in epochs. Points build while the avatar stays staked, the multipliers climb the longer it sits, and the boards redraw each cycle7. Each player also gets an identity credential built with IAMX, a decentralized identity provider, which sits in the same wallet as the avatar and is meant to carry progress between the app and the rest of the franchise9.
Much of the franchise is documentation rather than software. The project's own materials set out a location-based mobile game, an Unreal Engine role-playing game, and a Mandala token, none of them parts of the app you can open10.
